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A meeting of Imperialists Anonymous in 2010 by arendt
Good evening, and welcome. My name is Uncle Sam, and I'm an imperialist.
I used to be a popular, generous, brave fellow. People thought I was kind and well-meaning. Still, the warning signs were there: binge imperialism in the Philippines in my younger days, hundreds of bases all over the world, and a post-Cold War defense budget big enough to stop ten Joe Stalins. Still, I kept these self-destructive urges under some control.
It wasn't until I found a bottle of Bush Jr. that I completely fell off the wagon. I mean, after one swig of Daddy Bush, I went nuts, trashed Panama, and unloaded a NATO-sized pile of ordinance on Saddam's third-rate Army. Between that shot of Daddy Bush and the Nicaragua/Grenada martini made with Ronnie's Gin, I got a financial hangover that it took ten years of cold turkey plus a hot stock market to make go away. So, I swore off the hard stuff. But, after 8 years of being sober (if you don't count the hysterical screaming fits at Clinton's unfitness to serve as commander-in-chief) the pull of the old right-wing saloon just became too much. I had a slip.
I was listening to all these media whores, who hang out in the Neocon Inn, a gin mill over in Arlington. They kept after me, telling me I was a wimp ever since I let Bill Clinton be president. They sat me down at the bar and put a big glass of Bush, Jr. on the counter. Told me it would put hair on my chest. But, I wouldn't drink. After this standoff went on for a while, the staff of the Neocon Inn; John Bolton and a bunch of bouncers from Congress, came over with Fat Tony Scalia. Bolton pinned my arms and Fat Tony poured in the hootch. The media whores looked at each other like it was about to be payday.
As the old Love Potion #9 song goes:
I couldn't tell if it was day or night, I wanted to conquer everything in sight. Until I broke the budget at the WTO and they turned the dollar into - less than twenty lira
I just lost all control, started swigging Bush Jr 24/7 on all the corporate channels. Started beating the womenfolk for sassing me. Started stealing the children's lunch money to pay for more guns for more imperialist projects. Starting looking for fags to mug. And I got mean. I was never wrong. You know how it goes. Drunk goes home, busts up the house and blames the wife for being a bad housekeeper. I really starting wailing on that Democratic bitch. I emptied the bank account, borrowed on the family jewels, and kept spending on the imperialist bling-bling.
And, you know, I got a lot of respect from the boys at the Neocon Inn as long as I was buying them all drinks. (No girls there, unless you count Ann Coulter - and you can't do that no matter how wasted you get.) I bought for anyone who walked in - sleazy foreigners like Challabi, double-dealing generals like Musharraf, slippery oil shieks named bin Laden. They all loved me while I was paying.
But, along about 2006, I sort of blacked out. I can't remember exactly what happened. I think I invaded Iran or maybe Syria or Venezuela. I had run out of money by then; so to keep impressing the barflies I had to pull out my guns and pop a few sand-niggers to keep my audience happy. By this time, I was so incoherent it was absurd. My news media couldn't invent lies and BS as fast as I could stumble into a new fight. And people in the neighborhood were getting scared of all the screaming and gunshots and brawling in the Neocon Inn. So they called the cops.
If I wasn't so dead drunk, those effete Europeans, nasty Russians, sneaky Chinese, and Marxist South Americans would never have been able to tie me up with those funny monetary handcuffs. I could have beat up a whole police force of bums like that.
That was when I hit bottom, locked up in economic jail. Cold turkey on the military firewater. I was really hurting and hurting myself. Almost had me another Civil War over hallucinations about who God was talking to and what he was saying.
When I came out of the delirium, I was a wreck. I had lost a hundred pounds. My clothes hung on my bones. I was exhausted. I was also financially ruined. My neighbors were suing me for damages. I would have gone nuts, if I hadn't found IA. I know I have a disease. I will always be a recovering imperialist.
Now its time to read the 12 steps:
1. Admitted that the citizens of America were powerless over militarism and dictatorship, that diplomatic relations and domestic institutions had become unmanagable by violence.
2. Came to believe that a power greater than military, police, and media could restore this country to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of the United Nations.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to my citizens and to the rest of the world the exact nature of our collective wrongs. (Premeditated aggressive warfare, torture, vote-rigging, extensive violations of the Constitution...)
(and so on...)
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